One must be careful not to crow too quickly. Perceptions in a large and complex society can shift quickly, often for reasons that seem to make little sense to those of us inclined to be excessively rational or coldly analytical. But it seems more than possible that events and perceptions are converging in such a way that while it might be difficult to correct the mistakes made in the attack on Iraq, the American people might just be insulated or even immunized from the seductive call to go to war again in the near future.
In short, the enthusiasts for war and empire may have overplayed their hand – as people who combine power with arrogance generally do eventually – and made it more difficult to stir up support for future war and empire-building. Such immunization is unlikely to be permanent, and it will behoove friends of liberty to follow up aggressively on the advantages circumstances seem to have presented us, and to press home how mistaken were the assumptions of those who cajoled us into the war on Iraq, how dishonestly the campaign was waged, and how we should have learned the lesson that leaders with global ambitions are seldom to be trusted.
In short, although I don’t know if Bush 43 will follow in the footsteps of Bush 41 and be turned out of office shortly after a war that saw his approval ratings shoot to improbable heights, I suspect it will be harder to sell the next war to the American people. Even some of the president’s best friends implicitly acknowledge this.
Many pundits suggest that if Dubya is reelected he will have something of a free hand in a second term, and the neocons, playing to his sense of mission and self-importance, could bamboozle him into several next steps in the grand project of reshaping the Middle East. However, second terms for American presidents have seldom turned out to be the open road to freedom of action that some presidential supporters would like them to be. This is only in part because a second-term president becomes an instant lame duck, and the dedicated politicos are already paying more attention to the question of a successor than to any initiatives the denizen of the Oval Office has in mind.
I remember conservatives telling me that if Nixon were reelected in 1972 they had it on good authority that he would get serious about trimming the size of government. Instead we got Watergate. Instead of aggressive action during Reagan’s second term – though it did feature the ongoing crumbling of the Soviet empire, for which he deserves some credit but not as much as his partisans want to grant him – we got Iran-Contra. During Clinton’s second term we got Monicagate and an impeachment proceeding that was about much more than a stain on a dress.
FUMBLING ON MEET THE PRESS
Even the Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Bush 41 and seldom passes up a chance to praise the president, thought the president did poorly in the “Meet the Press” interview with Tim Russert. She put it down to a lack of facility at sticking with talking points, a characteristic the “great communicator,” Ronald Reagan, shared. Both are better at speeches, she wrote.
I happened on Monday to talk with Ed Feulner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who supported the war and (within the confines of heading a “non-political” think tank – which has, to be fair, been aggressive on the emerging issue of discretionary domestic overspending) a Bush enthusiast with only mild reservations. He said he was pleased with “the fact that he took the initiative, answered every question, took on every issue. It shows he’s raring to go in the Fall.”
Maybe. I think Peggy Noonan, a veteran of the presidential speechwriting game and no mean writer herself, offered the more accurate assessment. The president did not do himself any favors with this performance. David Brooks, in the New York Times, tried to help him out by rephrasing some of the key paragraphs in his own column, to make what he hoped President Bush was trying to say more persuasive. That very effort suggested a perception that Bush had blown it in the actual appearance.
Robert Novak, a skeptic on the war but well plugged-in with Capitol Republicans, titled his Thursday column “Strike Two for Bush,” writing that “Strike One was his humdrum State of the Union address.” He noted that Capitol Republicans were struck by the apparent absence of a plan going into the Russert interview, facing a generally tough interviewer “without precise answers on the decision to go to war in Iraq and on his National Guard service. The suspicion is that his 2004 campaign organization, a fund-raising juggernaut, is otherwise quite inadequate.”
Peggy Noonan returned to the fray on Thursday also, fascinated by the angry e-mails she got from Bush supporters but also sensing a certain desperation amongst them. “They’re nervous out there, the Bush people. If they weren’t so nervous they wouldn’t have cared about bad reviews.” After discoursing on how difficult it is to come up with the paragraph that explains why a president should be reelected and making it sound new, she challenged her readers to come up with one.
It will be difficult because of the qualifications she put on it: It must be “fresh, and succinct, something you believe and remember. And it’s got to be true. When the paragraph a president’s men come up with is not true, they lose. Jimmy Carter’s paragraph in 1980 was: We’re not so bad, and at least you know us, and Jimmy is a nice man, and by the way that Reagan guy is just too extreme and radical and right-wingy and nutty. People didn’t find Ronald Reagan too extreme. And he wasn’t too extreme. He seemed like a possible antidote to failure – Jimmy Carter’s failure in the world. The paragraph wasn’t true. Mr. Carter lost in a landslide.”
So the Bush reelection paragraph actually has to be true? That makes it a lot tougher than even Ms. Noonan might understand.
SELLING A FLAWED POLICY
It is probably true that a one-on-one interview is not the strongest possible forum for George W. Bush, but that’s not the fundamental reason he didn’t come off well in the interview with Tim Russert. He came off poorly because he was defending a flawed set of policies regarding Iraq – policies that were apparently decided independently of intelligence (or lack of it) about Saddam possessing certain nasty weapons but presented to the American people as a response to the near-certainty that he had them. Even the most eloquent salesperson is likely to appear a bit clumsy when selling a flawed or incoherent policy.
And when the evidence one convinced oneself was valid doesn’t pan out, you have to do a certain amount of tap dancing. Tap dancing looks easy, but the line between amateurs and professionals is readily visible.
That a sitting president would go on “Meet the Press” is unusual. It suggests that the president and his political team think he is in trouble – an impression backed by recent polls and the stubborn refusal of “weapons of mass destruction” or other evidence of an imminent threat to materialize in the sands of Iraq.
Mr. Russert asked about a “preemptive” war, but what the administration initiated was a “preventive” war, designed to prevent a potential or speculative threat from emerging.
Administration figures have developed some clever soundbites to justify this policy – “do we want to find weapons in the form of a mushroom cloud over Manhattan?” and the like – but they have yet to develop a coherent rationale for such a policy – The National Strategy statement of August 2002 might have done it for specialists, but it has yet to be explained in more popularized terms.
Most important, they have failed to explain how it differs from plain old aggression against any regime the president or his minions decide is sufficiently evil or unpleasant. They have certainly failed to discuss in any way that goes beyond obviously fallacious and not especially credible slogans some of the implications for what is, in fact, a revolutionary break with American tradition and international theories (if not always practice) about national sovereignty.
MORE QUESTIONS NEEDED
Here are a few questions that will require answers, especially since the first effort in preventive war has not gone anywhere near as well – the failure to find WMDs has emerged as a symbol but it may be the least important failure – as the enthusiasts tried to tell the American people it would go.
Would we like it if every country believed it had the right to enforce “regime change” though military force on countries halfway around the world? Are we ready to stay for the years and decades it might take to enforce “stability” in countries we invade? Are we ready to take casualties almost indefinitely? Does running another country enhance freedom for American citizens? Does beating up on Iraq amount to a victory in or a diversion from the struggle against more genuinely dangerous threat of al Qaida?
Those are only a few of the kinds of questions that need to be discussed during the upcoming campaign. With all due respect to the argument, which has some merit, that the United States has acted like an imperial power for decades now, and especially since the demise of the Soviet Union, the war on Iraq was a revolutionary departure from traditional American concepts of foreign policy.
I suspect that if questions are raised, the American people will reject this kind of aggressive imperialism – indeed, they may already have rejected it. The fact that the Bushies seek to hand over at least symbolic sovereignty to an Iraqi entity this year – an election year – suggests that the political planners in the Bush campaign have decided their man will do better if there are not wars or rumors of wars during the election season.
Unfortunately, I don’t expect Sen. Kerry – if he is the nominee – or Sen. Edwards or any of the Democrats to be much more probing or enlightening than President Bush.
INEVITABLE DISILLUSIONMENT?
It just may be, however, that we do not need the Democrats to develop a certain aversion to wars among the general populace. Weapons inspector David Kay continues to say, to anyone who asks him, that there is no point to continuing to look for nasty weapons caches in Iraq. He has blamed intelligence failures rather than political leaders for the misperceptions (all right, falsehoods) before the war, but many Americans are ready to blame political leaders or their political advisers.
Last week we had that remarkable speech by CIA chief George Tenet, distancing himself from any blame but confirming that our intelligence apparatus is in extremely sad shape. We’ve already started to have some neocons try to argue that it is precisely when intelligence is partial or faulty that it is most important to be ready to attack first, but I suspect that’s so absurd nobody will buy it and they’ll quickly drop it.
As casualties continue to mount, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Afghanistan is not a model democracy and Iraq is in worse shape, as the military steps up its campaign of reminding the political enthusiasts that one war after another costs money and lives, the appetite of the American people for future wars of choice rather than necessity is likely to abate – at least for a while. We would do well to take advantage of the phenomenon by explicating and popularizing alternate approaches to foreign policy, like war avoidance and genuine defense against real rather than exaggerated threats.
